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In 2007 I will continue to be dedicated to the Beginner

As I complete my first year on the Core I look back on a very satisfying year. While my interest and passions have taken me off in many odd directions I feel I have stayed close to my main objective of opening up DotNetNuke to the widest possible audience by helping the beginner. Think about it, there are more beginners than advanced developers. I believe our growth is in the multitudes turning to ASP.NET every day.

Nearly three years ago when I first got involved with DotNetNuke, the ability to create modules was held by a relative small percentage of the community. Many wanted to make modules but lacked the skill and an expensive copy of Visual Studio. Back in those days I made my first tutorial that showed people how to make a DotNetNuke module using Notepad.

Many in the DotNetNuke community felt that one of the biggest hurdles was learning how to create a module using the DAL. A few of us formed the DAL II project and while our proposal wasn’t the one that was eventually used, all of our objectives were implemented in the DAL+ (the method that was eventually created).

Another problem that beginners have a problem with is installing DotNetNuke. Nearly 2 years ago a number of us started the Firebird project in an effort to allow DotNetNuke to run on an embedded database. The plan was that you would not have to set a connection string or configure the web.config, you just unzip DotNetNuke in a directory and it comes up. The project faltered partially due to the fact that the team itself wasn’t running DotNetNuke using Firebird. In addition, when DotNetNuke 4 came out, the DotNetNuke install package with the automatic SQL Server Express achieves many of the projects objectives.

This year I will continue to maintain and advance the Survey module, serve as Core liaison for the Links module and data access issues (anyone interested in creating and maintaining an Open Source alternate data provider feel free to contact me). In addition I plan to produce more tutorials and technical documentation. I also have a project, IWEB, that allows you to create Web Services for your DotNetNuke Portal. We will develop it for the next 9 months or so and make a proposal for possible inclusion in the Core.

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